Telstra builds 900 machine learning models for marketing overhaul

Telstra has used open source machine learning technology to answer the age-old question that plagues every marketer: how effective is my ad spend? The telco wields one of the biggest marketing budgets in Australia, but that doesn't stop Telstra from wanting to track the performance of every dollar spent. The company previously faced a six-month lag to get visibility into the effectiveness of its marketing spend; that is now down to five weeks using new marketing mix modelling developed in partnership with Accenture, Deakin University and Servian. The telco previously used a traditional econometric model to assess the performance of its marketing spend, pulling together 800 variables – which took two-and-a-half months to assemble – and then modelling this using regression techniques. "Six months after the marketing period had ended I could tell the CMO [chief marketing officer] and the marketers how effective their marketing was... six months ago," Telstra's director of research, insights & analytics Liz Moore told the recent Big Data & Analytics Innovation Summit in Sydney.